Fortune is a Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

consummating the transaction a little more personally later that night. Bessie was a nice woman, she ran a fair establishment, and he'd made a good profit on his shipment; it was nothing more than that to either of them. Except a couple of months later when he found himself back in Virginia City and Bessie told him she was pregnant.
    She was thirty-four years old, she had never had a child, and she intended to have this one. Lloyd shrugged, passed a couple of thousand dollars across the bar and promised casually to "see her all right." Then he thought nothing more of it.
    When he returned to Virginia City a year later he was told Bessie had died in childbirth and the baby—a boy— was being looked after by the whores. He stared at the infant sleeping in a Moses basket on top of the mahogany bar while blue cigar smoke and even bluer language floated around him.
    Picking up the basket, he walked to the door. "This is my boy," he said firmly. "My son. He's coming home with me."
    But first he had to build that home. He chose his lot carefully on top of the almost empty California hill and built the first of its grand mansions. Later it would be called "Nob Hill," because the men who lived there were like the nabobs of the east, the most powerful in San Francisco and rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He spent over a million dollars creating a palace for his son and he made sure that everything was the best. While it was being built, he took a suite at the lavish Oriental Hotel, where he left his son in the care of three nursemaids and returned to his old stamping grounds at the silvermines.
    When the house was finally finished it occupied a full city block. It had more than sixty rooms including a drawing room with painted wall paneling brought from a French château, a ballroom with mirrors copied from those at Versailles, and floors and bathrooms of marble imported from Italy. There were three hundred silver wall sconces and forty crystal chandeliers from Venice, as well as forests of oak paneling and a great staircase from a Jacobean mansion in England. The tall windows were hung with satin and velvet drapes imported from Lyons in France, and the floors covered with magnificent rugs from Persia. The stables in back of the house rivaled it in luxury, with polished rosewood stalls embellished with silver, mosaic tiled floors, Brussels rugs, and elaborate chandeliers. The mansion was the talk of San Francisco, as was Lloyd's flamboyant lifestyle.
    His son, Harmon, was brought up by nursemaids and governesses and by the age of seven already ruled the household like a tyrant; his word was law. "You tell 'em, son," his father would chuckle, watching young Harmon giving orders to the maids. "You show 'em who's the man of the house."
    When he was ten Lloyd sent him back east to a smart prep school to teach him how to behave in men's company. "You've been around namby-pamby women too long," he told him. Harmon was of average intelligence, tall, fair, and good-looking, and he had a great deal of money to throw about. He quickly acquired a coterie of hangers-on and he enjoyed his school years and the new masculine company. At eighteen he went to Princeton, returning home at age twenty-one with a diploma and a sense of his own importance. He had become an overnight aristocrat.
    It was a dreadful shock, therefore, when one night Lloyd, slightly the worse for drink, told him the truth about his mother, Bessie Maloney of Maloney's Cat House. Devastated, Harmon nursed the secret in his heart and his hatred for his "mother" grew into a burning hatred for all women.
    For a handsome young man, Harmon sowed few wild oats. He preferred masculine company and sporting events and considered women a secondary breed, put there for a man's entertainment—and not worth the money he had to spend on them.
    Lloyd died when Harmon was twenty-two and he found himself the sole inheritor of an estate calculated in excess of eighty-five million dollars. He